What is the average American's total tax burden?

Answer 1

You may well be using terms different than what you want to find.

Statistical average probably means nothing in this instance:

The Top 1% of earners pay @40% of all taxes.

The Top 5% of earners pay @60% of all taxes.

The bottom 50% of earners only pay @3% of all taxes. These figure exclude payroll tax of which the Top 1% pay next to nothing and yet accounts for ~40% of all federal revenue.

And since most of the wealth that top 1% enjoy is a transfers from those creating the wealth(labor - per Abe Lincoln) that top 1% is skating on their share in proportion to the protection provided by the state(Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations)

So, while the statistical average may be something like 25K per taxpayer, that's because those top 5% pay many, many times that amount each, and the lower 50% pay much less than that...in fact most of the lower 50% pay no tax and actually get money back...through earned income credits, etc.

The independent group Tax Foundation provides a great deal of data on their site. Even an average by different locales (like city areas), but again that's just the amount of tax collected divided by the number of returns...so say 1 person paying 1 million in tax and 20 paying 10 thousand would show an average of over 57 thousand each.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/250.HTML

*note: This data only pertains to Federal Income Tax and doesn't take into account payroll taxes which are extremely regressive.